The AI chatbot just gets me
Finding the right tech gift is complicated. There are the needs of the gift recipient, the availability of options, comparisons of features and specs, and your budget. As a tech expert, you’d think I’d have an easier time, but my brain is mostly overwhelmed with tech minutiae, and I struggle to boil it all down into a useful and timely decision. It’s in these moments where artificial intelligence and a growing legion of generative, large language model chatbots can do the most good.
Put another way, I’ve been having a week-long conversation with ChatGPT 4o about what to get my mother-in-law, and while the AI has not entirely solved my problem, it gets huge points for patience, persistence, and memory.
My sharp-as-a-tack mother-in-law lives alone, and while she’s steady on her feet, we do worry about her in an emergency situation like a fall, which led my wife and me to wonder if a wearable with fall detection might be a good gift.
As we talked, my wife eyed me as if she were waiting for something, and I realized it was a concrete answer: «Which wearable should we get her?» Since Mom is an Android phone user (her aging handset is from LG, a company that no longer makes phones), my first choice, an Apple Watch SE, was out of the question.
I’ve tested a few Android wearables, like the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra and the best Google Pixel Watches, but I couldn’t recall which ones had built-in fall detection. I was preparing to do the research but, daunted by the task (read «lazy»), decided to give ChatGPT 4o a chance.The shopping conversation
The benefit of using an AI chatbot is that you can ask complicated questions conversationally, and it’ll almost always be smart enough to understand and respond.
Here was my initial prompt:
«I want to find a smartwatch or a fitness watch that has simple notifications, fall detection, and can send an emergency alert. It’s for my mother-in-law who does not own an Apple Watch. It has to be Android-compatible. I want it to be incredibly easy to use and under $300.»
I put it in once as a straight prompt to ChatGPT and then using ChatGPT search. Since I know that the latter uses the live web to inform its results, I assumed the answer would be more timely and accurate. It turned out that both responses were accurate and more helpful than I anticipated.
ChatGPT replied, «For your mother-in-law, an Android-compatible smartwatch that offers simple notifications, fall detection, and emergency alert capabilities under $300 would be ideal.
